ART/ARCHITECTURE

ART/ARCHITECTURE; Pop Art Was Part French: Mais Oui! Just Ask Them

By ALAN RIDING

Published: April 15, 2001

Correction Appended

PARIS—
THE Georges Pompidou Center is justly celebrated for its 20th-century art, its rich permanent collection as well as its blockbuster exhibitions. When it was founded in 1977, however, it was given a much broader mandate, one that also embraces architecture, industrial design, experimental dance, electro-acoustical music and avant-garde cinema. And it is this multidisciplinary vocation that equips it to identify and explore cultural movements that define an epoch.

Of course, it can also be risky to draw parallels between diverse art forms in different countries when the connections are not obvious. In its latest exhibition, ''Les Années Pop, 1956-1968,'' which runs through June 18, the Pompidou has assumed that risk. It has laid out a cultural smorgasbord from the United States, Britain and France to support its case that Pop Art was part of a larger international phenomenon including architecture, design, movies and music.

Yet some French critics have seen in this a revisionist attempt to inflate France's role in the 60's. Are they being unfair?

For today's generation, Pop Art may well be remembered principally for the comic strip images and celebrity icons bequeathed by Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, but at its height it involved far more. Many people might be surprised to learn that what seemed like a quintessentially American art movement was in fact born in Britain. (This was underlined in ''Pop Art: U.S./U.K. Connections, 1956-1966,'' which just closed at the Menil Collection in Houston.) So, why not? Perhaps the French role has also been overlooked.

Catherine Grenier, the curator of the Pompidou show, admits that she called it ''Les Années Pop'' (''The Pop Years'') because, strictly speaking, French artists did not do Pop Art. Instead, in 1960, thanks to the French art critic Pierre Restany, artists like Arman, César and Jean Tinguely became known as the Nouveaux Réalistes. Nonetheless, they had much in common with their British and American colleagues: the French artists, too, were responding to mass-produced throwaway objects and their television advertising images; they, too, believed that by isolating the new detritus of daily life, they were holding up a mirror to society.

It's no surprise, then, that this show is not divided into national groups, because that would emphasize their different approaches; rather, it is organized chronologically into three periods, with visual-art galleries followed in every case by space devoted to architecture, design and cinema. Pop music also accompanies the visitor, much of it from 60's groups like the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Beach Boys and the Who, along with the evergreen Bob Dylan. (Here, at least, French singers, even the still-rocking rocker Johnny Hallyday, are noticeably absent.) In all these genres, artists seemed convinced that the future was nigh.

Indeed, this show begins in 1956 because in that year an exhibition called ''This Is Tomorrow'' was organized at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London by a so-called Independent Group of artists. Their display also included what is now recognized as the inaugural work of Pop Art, Richard Hamilton's small collage ''Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing,'' with its Charles Atlas figure surrounded by the trappings of modernity, a vacuum cleaner, a tape recorder, a television set, a tin of ham, a comic book poster and the like. Soon afterward, the British critic Lawrence Alloway coined the term Pop Art, and it quickly caught on.

In a letter to friends in 1957, Mr. Hamilton even dared offer a definition of what he, Peter Blake, David Hockney and other Britons were up to. He wrote, ''Pop Art is: popular (designed for a mass audience); transient (short-term solution); expendable (easily forgotten); low cost; mass-produced; young (aimed at youth); witty; sexy; gimmicky; glamorous; big business.'' He added, ''This is just a beginning.'' It certainly was.

While France's Nouveaux Réalismes had César crushing cars, Christo wrapping consumer hardware and Tinguely building motor-driven mechanical contraptions, the late 1950's in the United States signaled the end of Abstract Expressionism. Now came Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Indiana and Larry Rivers, artists who, in a nod to Marcel Duchamp and the Dada movement, began addressing the symbols of daily life. The exhibition seems to overlook no one; Mr. Johns's emblematic ''Flag,'' his Stars and Stripes oil of 1958, is naturally included.

Architects and designers, however, were going their own way, creating futuristic furniture in plastic, using the new space age to suggest that science fiction was no longer fiction. The house of the future was variously portrayed as inflatable, in capsule form, in prefabricated modules. ''Fun Palace,'' which Cedric Price designed for the English stage director Joan Littlewood with mobile halls and stages, was never built, but the architectural drawings are in this show. It is hard not to recognize ''Fun Palace'' as a precursor of the Pompidou Center itself, with its inside-out, refinerylike design.

''Les Années Pop'' turns more directly to Pop Art in its second section, where Lichtenstein makes his appearance with ''Look Mickey,'' Warhol with ''Shot Sage Blue Marilyn,'' ''Early Colored Liz (Turquoise)'' and ''Shopping Bag'' (with an image of a can of Campbell's Soup), and Martial Raysse with ''High Tension Painting.''

The Pompidou has also reunited most of the dispersed elements of ''The Store,'' Claes Oldenburg's room-size installation of furniture and everyday objects variously made of metal, rubber, plaster and wood. By the mid-1960's, the center of gravity of Pop Art had clearly moved to New York. Films made by Warhol's Factory carry some of the mood to Paris today.

In France, the Nouvelle Vague was flourishing, and some images from movies like François Truffaut's ''400 Blows'' and ''Jules and Jim'' and Alain Resnais's ''Last Year in Marienbad'' are included here. Yet while the new French cinema undoubtedly represented a break with the past, it is less apparent that it formed part of a new popular culture: its films were made by and for intellectuals. Indeed, then as now, Britain was always more populist in its culture and, as such, maintained a two-way flow of influences with the United States: pop music even offered an example of how a music style imported from the United States was then re-exported by British groups back to the United States.

The final section of this show is called ''Dream and Conflict.'' Here, though many of the earlier themes continue to be explored, the mood clearly darkens as a certain innocence is shattered by the shadow of the Vietnam War and the rise of the drug culture. George Maciunas revisits Mr. Johns's ''Flag,'' but this time the stars are skulls and the stripes include lines like ''U.S.A. surpasses all genocide records!'' Mr. Hamilton's silk-screen series ''Swinging Sixties'' in turn shows Mick Jagger hiding his face as he is driven away by the police after being arrested for drug possession.

By 1968, with the May student uprising in Paris and the urban riots and antiwar protests in the United States, ''Les Années Pop'' were well over. By the end of this show, the case also seems to have been made that 1956 to 1968 did mark a period of artistic and social liberation in Europe as well as the United States.

Less clear, perhaps, is whether different art forms were responding to one another sufficiently to represent a true cultural movement. And, in truth, France's role still looks fairly peripheral. France, on the other hand, is infamous for looking back. To judge by ''Les Années Pop,'' it seems to be enjoying the 60's today as much as it did at the time.

Photos: ''Ringo Starr,'' a 1967 poster by Richard Avedon, above, and ''High Tension Painting,'' 1965, by Martial Raysse. (Collection of Alain Weill); (ADAGP)(pg. 35); ''Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing,'' a collage by Richard Hamilton, in ''Les Années Pop, 1956-68'' at the Pompidou Center in Paris. (ADAGP)(pg. 33)

Correction: April 22, 2001, Sunday An article last Sunday about an exhibition of Pop Art at the Pompidou Center in Paris referred incorrectly to the exhibition ''Pop Art: U.S./U.K. Connections, 1956-1966'' at the Menil Collection in Houston. It remains open; the closing is not until May 13.